I’ll add something right up front here: It’s not my fault I notice things. In a way, it’s my job, if I’m going to blog. I guess this form of interwriting is a very loose form of journalism. Er, maybe not journalism. Epistles? I dunno. I’ve been accused of birthing more screeds than Savonarola, but I don’t see it like that. Like I said, it’s not my fault I notice things.

Noticing things can get you into big trouble these days. Or more to the point, noticing the wrong things. But I can’t help myself. No matter how many times you do it, I’ll always notice when allegedly educated persons no longer know the difference between vice and vise, or mislead and misled, or ken the similarity between a tattoo and a port wine stain. Oh well.

So let’s watch a video, shall we, and I’ll ruin it for you properly by noticing things afterward. What it’s like to manufacture stuff in China:

It sure is interesting to me, and I’m grateful to Maneesh for filling me in about something I don’t know much about. I’ve worked in a factory or two, so that’s not what I find informative. I’ve made quite hi-tech stuff in those factories, too, much more so than the plastic trifles made in the video. But it was a while ago, and while it was mechanized, it wasn’t robotized like that.

Some things I noticed: Maneesh, who is intelligent and informative, appears slightly unhinged. Most everyone does these days. His clothing and general demeanor is childlike, and I don’t mean that as a compliment. He’s shopping around for a factory to make a product he’s going to sell in the US. That’s a serious business, or used to be, or should be, anyway. Those people sitting there making the stuff, and people everywhere just like them, depend on management to act rationally, in order to keep sitting on those chairs and getting paid. Please note that the workers aren’t dressed like half a clown, and mugging for the camera. I know when management got rapacious, but when did management get silly?  I’m not sure, exactly, but Maneesh and his cohort are just mimicking the slide-deck, rah-rah, go fast and break things, ruthlessly dogfooding, key learnings, boil the ocean zeitgeist adumbrated by techbro jerks like Steve Jobs.

I found the first ten seconds of the video as interesting as the rest of it. Bombing along the Chinese highway, looking out the window. Not enough people simply point a camera at their surroundings so you can see what’s going on in a faraway place. Well, not enough people who know enough to turn their cellphones sideways, anyway. The official media never points their cameras at anything anymore. They’re 100 percent into the not-noticing phase of information delivery. They point cameras at themselves, and tell you what they fantasize is happening instead.

So I got curious about what Maneesh was going to make in the factory he’s trying to find in China. I got to poking around, and noticed this:

Speaking of noticing things, I can’t be the only person who notices how profoundly weird everyone wants to look in this video. The women look like they go to a funeral parlor to get made up, and the only person wearing a tie to talk about a half-a-mil calls himself “Mr. Wonderful” to dispel any seriousness he might be saddled with.

Maneesh is nervous, and they pull at him like pitbull/poodle hybrids at a toddler. He gets a slap for his troubles, but he toddled off somewhere else, and makes and sells the thing anyway.

If you click on the image, you can visit the website and see what’s on offer, but I’ll save you some time. It’s an obedience shock collar you wear on your wrist instead of your pencil neck so that people only get a slightly disturbed vibe from you, not the full dose of your emotional delirium tremens. It’s an invisible fence for you instead of your pitbull/poodle mix. It’s a Timex wearable Skinner Box. It gives you an electric jolt every time you start to badthink. The punchline of the joke is that it doesn’t know anything, so if you’re trying to quit smoking or something, you have to remember to give yourself a shock when you want a coffin nail. So I gather that you don’t have enough willpower to close the refrigerator door, even though you weigh two bills already, but you’re expected to have enough willpower to shock yourself when you reach for the fourth Klondike bar you had today. I can’t help noticing a personality disconnect there.

However, I quibble. I’m glad to support this product in any way I can. Although there will be some ground rules, people. You’ll all wear these things, but I’ll press the buttons for you. And fair warning: I notice a lot more of your bad habits than you do.

Noticing. It’s a Bitch.